Microsoft banks on bots to restore company's mobile relevance

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says the company is committed to playing a key role in the emerging market for artificial intelligence-based chat software. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg) Microsoft has seen the future, and it is bots.Unfortunately, Microsoft Corp.’s most high-profile attempt at showcasing the future – the conversational chatbot called Tay – turned into a racist, anti-social monster that appears unfixable. But even if Tay worked perfectly, it didn’t actually have any jobs to do, and the kind of bots Microsoft wants its software partners to develop and host on platforms like Skype are intended to reshape technology from something based on pointing and clicking to an actual conversation with our machines. Microsoft chief executive officer Satya Nadella outlined his vision of the future to a crowd of software developers in…